EATING HEAVEN

Lemon & Lime Tart

Headed to a dinner with friends, a ‘pie night’ in celebration of all things dough entombed! My contribution is more held than encased, technically not a pie at all. But entrusted with the sweet ending to the meal, I decided a tart would be a fitting and lighter end to things. I’m not sure where…

Gopnik on Cafes and Restaurants

I quoted yesterday from Adam Gopnik’s beautiful book The Table Comes First. As one who tries to write about tables and food, I bow down to writers like this. Gopnik not only writes well and ranges broadly, he sees in food so much more than food. The book is a delight to read. I don’t…

Gopnik on Coffee and Wine

‘French cooking was made not merely in the space between caffeine and alcohol but in the simultaneous presence of both, thus blending, in sequence, the two drugs by which modern people shape their lives. Good food takes place in the head space between them … Modern life is regulated by these drugs, morning to night–one…

Poetry at the café #2

The coffee lover’s psalm (with apologies to David) Caffeine is my shepherd; I shall not doze. It maketh me to wake in green pastures: It leadeth me beyond the sleeping masses. It restoreth my buzz: It leadeth me in the paths of consciousness for its name’s sake. Yea, though I walk through the valley of…

Feast Yourselves: a prayer

God beyond all our gods Lord of lords You offer us life’s bread crusty warm yeasty buttered dark– as healthful as good– and we gum day old white; in the midst of Your banquet we nibble away at the same Old Kraft cheese sandwich There is…

Two more reviews

Two more reviews of Eating Heaven. Fellow Baptist and good friend Darren Cronshaw has reviewed the book for The Missional Network. You can read his words here. And Wendy Rush over at the South Australian Rise Magazine has also been generous in the February issue. ‘ … an easy, revealing and thoroughly enjoyable read about our place…

Pastorchef!

Though church ministers do all sorts of odd things, it’s not often they get to host cooking demonstrations. You gotta love this job! Just yesterday, as part of the Feast•Pray•Love art exhibition and the wider Melbourne Food and Wine Festival, I got to foist my minimal cooking expertise on some unsuspecting folks at Collins Street’s…

A restaurant shepherd

A few years back I had the pleasure of meeting Esther Lou, a Chinese-American woman who has a ministry to kitchen workers in the Chinese restaurants of Los Angeles. She calls herself a ‘restaurant shepherd’. Industry statistics tell of more than 1 million immigrant labourers working in some 42,000 Chinese restaurants in the US. According…

Poetry at the table #3

Last week I attended Mass at St Francis here in the city. It was not a planned thing. I just happened to be in the neighbourhood. It’s a familiar place. In fact, I used to take my students there each year. In an introduction to spirituality, we visited several churches of various brands, St Francis included. I…

Poetry at the café #1

New year’s resolutions are fine, really. But when a friend told me earlier this year he’s resolved to give up coffee, quite frankly he crossed a line. I like coffee. Coffee is good and I’m sure there’s a sacred text somewhere that says so. To imagine my daily round without it is … well, it’s…

Interview with Eternity

Eternity is a national religious newspaper published monthly by the Bible Society. Not only has my ever-so-slightly-biased friend Kara Martin (faculty member at Ridley College) written a very generous review of Eating Heaven, they’ve now published an extended interview they did with me on the subject of the book.

Supper and justice

‘.. without supper, without love, without table companionship, justice can become a program that we do to other people.’ M. Davis, ‘Dorothy Day: The Only Solution is Love’ in Hospitality 17 (1), 1988.

‘Eating Heaven’ at Readings

Chris Gordon, Events Manager at Readings Bookstore, has offered some affirming words for Eating Heaven. As we move towards our Christmas Day preparations for the ‘Meal to End All Meals’, with expectations heightened by all around you, let’s remember why we do this every single year, even if we are not religious, spiritual or family…

De Botton on the Table

The popular English philosopher Alain de Botton has gotten a mountain of press over his book Religion for Atheists, and not all of it glowing. I’ve commented on it more generally here. But what he says about the table is worth a separate mention. In one of his early chapters, de Botton argues that embracing the stranger…

‘Eating Heaven’ on Radio National

Tonight on Radio National’s The Spirit of Things, the program Food for Body and Soul includes an interview I did with the delightful Rachael Kohn on Eating Heaven. You can download the podcast here.

Ethos review

Just yesterday the Ethos Centre for Christianity and Society included a review of Eating Heaven by Megan Curlis-Gibson in its Engage publication. The review includes reflections on much more than the book. It’s worth a read.

Review in Australian Christian Writers

The author Anne Hamilton has provided a lovely review on the site of Australian Christian Writers, an organisation, I’m afraid to say, I didn’t even know existed. But now I do! Thank you Anne. You can access the review here.

‘Eating Heaven’ launched

It was a great relief last night to see the book Eating Heaven officially launched. Because my writing is atrociously slow, whenever something finally eventuates, my sense of relief is beyond reasonable. Still, it was an affirming night full of supportive friends, generous words and lots of book sold! Readers Feast bookstore was the venue, a wonderful neighbour to Collins…

Poole’s ‘You Aren’t What You Eat’

Not long ago I read Stephen Poole’s biting little book You Aren’t What You Eat: Fed Up with Gastroculture. In the final chapter I scrawled in the margins ‘I am drenched with sarcasm’. Truly, it drips from every page. Still, despite the lasting damp, Poole’s critique should be heard. Poole takes aim at the current cultural obsessions with…

Southern Fare III

With my beloved far away in rural Texas, I’ve been re-reading Michael Lee West’s Consuming Passions, a delightfully written memoir of food and family in the South. It makes me wish even more I was there with her. West’s personal observations about gender in the kitchens of her Tennessee childhood illustrate how much has changed in…